


The One of Us To Survive

by cjmarlowe



Category: Ripper Street
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Gin - Freeform, Mention of Canonical Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 14:57:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1095351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cjmarlowe/pseuds/cjmarlowe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fred has always been a little bit angry. One cannot be a man of his proclivities, in his position and coming from where he has, without possessing a righteous anger to drive his action, fire to help him rise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The One of Us To Survive

**Author's Note:**

  * For [notkingyet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/notkingyet/gifts).



He's resorting to the divorce courts this week, seeking headline news among the falsified scandals therein, which is the very picture of desperation. No one cares that Lord So-and-so was photographed in bed with a tart, still in his top hat and tails. Not even the courts believe in the integrity of such tableaus anymore, and they certainly won't make a saleable headline without something spicier than that, but all Fred has managed to dredge up is a deep unhappiness that both partners wanted out of and barely a whiff of genuine scandal.

He hates them for it, for not providing him with his livelihood and for taking for granted what Fred himself could not have. And he hates himself for feeling for them, trapped by a law that does more harm than good. He knows everything of what that does to a man.

Fred has always been a little bit angry. One cannot be a man of his proclivities, in his position and coming from where he has, without possessing a righteous anger to drive his action, fire to help him rise. He doesn't wear his rage like a barbarian. He doesn't lash out with his fists or even his carefully chosen words. But after Harry, after losing the thing that made everything else bearable, it became ever harder to keep the anger from searing forth unbridled, and he became less inclined to try.

Who should then find happiness, if Fred himself cannot?

A deadly fire gives Fred a last minute reprieve from an anemic headline, but it's not with any particular cheer that he sets the type.

As he thinks so often after a long day's work, for various and sundry reasons, Fred needs a drink. Not from the flask in his desk, which suffices on most occasions, but a proper drink in a proper glass, served to him without any impropriety about it, or at least no more than any other man sitting alone at the bar with a half-empty glass in his hand .

He is very good at being alone and very good at letting his eyes wander without letting on; it serves him in both his professional life and his personal one. (When the twain meet he finds himself less capable at the worst times, for the pressure then becomes almost too great to bear.)

The pub's patrons are thick on the floor, moving around one another like treacle, slowly and with little grace as they catch on sleeves and umbrellas and twist in their streams of movement. There's a young man by the door, hat in hand and looking as if he's just got off the train and somehow inexplicably found himself in the heart of Whitechapel. A better man than Fred would supply him with a drink and some sound advice. A worse would pick his pocket and leave him for the streets. Fred is neither a good man or a bad man, he is just a man who wants to take his pleasure where he can, even if only with his eyes.

"Another?" says Ellie, the darker of the two barmaids. Fred is surprised to see that his glass is empty, right down to the dregs, despite the fact that he thought himself to be nursing it.

"I'll be the story, if I do," he murmurs, but does not moderate himself all the same. "Leave the bottle."

She brings it to him without delay and then stays at his elbow, too close to have just chosen an empty bit of barfront (this despite the press of the crowd, which would resemble that at a brawl more than a public house if not for the constant attempts at grace of movement).

"If it's a story you're looking for, there's plenty of things I could tell you," she said. "All sorts of folk come through these doors."

The press of her breasts against his arm suggests she's got one or two tales at best to dangle like a lure to entice him away with her, and nothing further to offer him. Fred does not bite at that sort of bait.

"I've already gone to press," he says curtly, an excuse no one familiar with newpapermen would buy for an instant, but he makes more eye contact with his gin than her, and it's the work of only a moment to send her on her way. There's a woman who holds much more interest for him at the other end of the bar, inasmuch as any woman does, and he shifts his seat till he's but one stool away from her, with the bottle between.

"You'll get nothing from me tonight," says Rose before he even speaks. "I'll not speak a word against him, Mr Best."

"I am merely offering companionship," he insists.

"You're offering something I haven't ever asked for," says Rose. "Can't a girl drink in peace?"

"In here?" says Fred. "It's not terribly likely, and there is worse company than mine, I'm sure."

"Well, then one of us is sure of that," says Rose, but when a tall gentleman with a scar on his cheek makes a little too friendly on her other side, she moves into the empty stool between them, leaving no space for anyone else. "You're trouble."

"I won't deny that, if that was your intention," he says, refilling his own glass, then hers. "Nothing important was ever done that didn't cause a little trouble first."

"You call ruining Detective Reid's reputation important?" The anger in him writhes and roils; why should Reid have what he cannot? Why should Reid flout the rules whilst punishing others who do the same, or less? "Will Bennet Drake be next?"

Drake is a brute, make no mistake. There were times when Fred would have trawled through any muck-filled gutter to find something to use on him. But he can't forget now that there was a moment when he said, "Please help him," in desperation, and Drake did not hesitate to go.

Vincent died all the same, but of the many things he pins on Leman Street, that is not one of them.

"Only if he's done something to deserve it."

Rose looks away, but says, "Nothing so bad as that," and accepts the drink he's poured for her. "There is only so much pain a man is meant to endure."

Fred is talking to Rose because she is interesting and occasionally indiscreet and, more than either of those things, present at a convenient moment, but he did not have any intention of pressing her for anything tonight. Only using her for the illusion of her companionship, the way she is doing with him. If the illusion has some semblance of reality to it, then that is fortuitous and not calculated.

"You are a woman of good moral direction, Miss Erskine—"

"Oh _am_ I?"

"So let me pose a question to you, on the subject of a man's pain," he says. Not physical pain, though his hand almost strays to his mutilated ear, but the pain of wanting too much. "Would it be better to do the thing you desire most, even if you lose everything else?"

"Well, what's everything else?" she says. "I wouldn't lose my life over it."

"Your reputation," he says. "Your position. Possibly your liberty."

"I've done worse for less," she says, "and that's no confession for your papers, Mr Best, for it's no secret. What's the point, if you haven't got hope for a better life?"

"Can a person not have both happiness and ambition?" he says. "Why must it be a choice?"

"The world ain't never been fair for the likes of us," said Rose. "All you can do is keep going. And if you have such problems with it, Mr Best, then you ought to stop making people make it. Disgrace is brought about by your press and not by nothing else."

"Only those who have give me cause to do so," says Fred. Those very many. Those lords and judges and councillors and landlords and policemen who have used their positions to make the lives of people like Fred, of Fred himself, harder than they need be by circumstance alone. Those people, he will go to the ends of the earth to dig up dirt on. That those people make the better headlines is not something he denies. "I only report what the people want to know."

"Then the people ought to want to know a little less," says Rose. "What do you know of dreams, anyway?"

Harry had written him, a letter of little discretion that Fred could not bring himself to burn regardless of the damning consequences should it be discovered. He had done nothing wrong, but the risk to Fred and to everything he'd worked for had become too great, and the letter went unanswered. Harry knew, though, what had happened; in general if not the particulars of Fred's blackmail. Surely he was not sitting at home mystified as to why their liaisons had suddenly stopped.

"Everybody dreams," says Fred, and something of his tone must give him away there because Rose's look becomes softer. "Everyone wants to better their lives."

There is a small safety in numbers, and the crowd in the pub that means that the nearest people are only inches from their conversation also means that they are virtually invisible. Certainly, no one is listening in on their conversation. No one cares enough to try.

"If you mean that, I've got a few suggestions for you."

"Nothing I haven't heard, I'm sure," he says, smiling ruefully into his gin. But his is a noble cause. The truth of various varnishes is a noble cause and his livelihood is noble too, or at least it is to him. That someone like him can rise up to a position of respect and power—of a small amount, of a sort—is not nothing. And little, to Fred, is sacred, nor should it be. 

"Do you know love, Mr Best?"

He startles at the question, and shakes his head too vehemently.

"Love can change you," she says.

"In the worst ways."

"And the best," she says. "You strike me as someone who needs the best brought out in him."

"Well," he says, and coughs, and doesn't look at her. His glass is empty again, but he doesn't reach for the bottle. "Doesn't everyone?"

"And perhaps then you won't feel the need to trample on anyone else's," says Rose. As if it is as easy as that. As if Fred can go profess his love without consequence. "Think on it."

"I'm not convinced you're an expert on the topic at hand," he says, a tarter insult trapped on the tip of his tongue at the last moment. He is angry, an unfocused anger at the world and all things in it, but not at her, and it's not hard this time to silence it.

"I am a woman who has known many men," she says, without shame, "and I am almost certainly the most expert on the subject who will deign to speak with you on it. Thank you for the gin, Mr Best, but I must be off now."

"Of course," he says. "You have a performance. Your star is rising, Miss Erskine."

"I shan't give up," says Rose, and though she does not speak of her trials of love, Fred knows of them more thoroughly than anyone probably ought to. Lesser woman than her would have given up long ago. "Nor should you. Perhaps you will yet find a way to have it all."

The words are a kindness, and he takes them as such.

His office is not far from here, where the letter from Harry still sits. Where he has ink and stationary and a return address at which to send him correspondence. Perhaps his judgment is swayed by the gin, but if he is careful, if he shows more discretion with his words than Harry did... and Fred is nothing if not an expert at making words do what he wishes them to do.

Perhaps, he should pay his tab and press his way out of the bar and let his anger drive him to more productive endeavours. Perhaps, he should let go and let someone kiss the anger away, at least for a little while. He looks at what remains of the bottle of gin and thinks.

Perhaps he'll go do that now.


End file.
